MAY 2015 Sixty Eighth Edition BISI COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER GUIDING STATEMENT OF THE BRITISH INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL ISTANBUL The British International School Istanbul provides a caring international environment, fostering cultural diversity. Individual students achieve their full academic potential, inspired to become lifelong learners and responsible citizens of the global community. YOUR COMMUNITY! YOUR NEWS! 1 Message from the Pre/Primary School From our Guiding Statements, we ‘educate students in a stimulating environment to the highest possible academic standard’ and we are dedicated to ‘strive for continuous improvement’. With this in mind, we have strengthened our Primary curriculum with the creation of a Middle Leadership Team. Our Primary Middle Leadership Team have a simi- lar role to the Heads of Department in the Secondary School. Miss Julie Esiyok oversees the History and Geography curriculum for the Primary School. She worked exceptionally hard to arrange a stimulating History Week this month. The children enjoyed participating in more focused History activities in this specialist week. They experienced differ- ent rooms in the Primary building displaying distinctive periods of global history. The children relished their lunch as they had to eat without any knives and forks for the day! A huge thank you goes to Miss Esiyok, all the teachers for organising their rooms so innovatively, and to all the parents who assisted the teachers in gathering artefacts for the week. We challenged our gifted athletes this month with their trip to Athens for the COBIS Games. They competed against 12 other British/ International schools from around the world in the disciplines of football, basketball and swimming. Many of our children achieved a personal best. A huge thank you goes to our sponsors and the teachers who accom- panied the children to this important event in our sporting calendar. Congratulations to the teams; your commitment and dedication paid off! For our younger children, the EYFS Sports Day was so much fun this year! The event opened with an impressive gymnastic display from some of our talented Primary students. The sports events began and the children loved partic- ipating in the water race, the bicycle race, the obstacle course, and ball games with the parachute. The children, teachers and parents then relaxed in the Botanic Gardens and appreciated the barbeque arranged for them. Thank you to the PE department, especially Miss Yana for assembling the day, and Miss Ozlem and her staff for arranging the barbeque. As our Guiding Statements also encourage, we ‘educate students to be respectful of, and knowledgeable about, and be involved in their local and international communities’. We thank our community for giving so generously to the Nepal earthquake appeal. We are also grateful to all our families for supporting our Fun Day Fridays so well this month. We collect items on the four Fridays preceding Fun Day in exchange for the children to wear their own clothes and come to school in a funny costume. Tickets for adults are 10TL and children have free entry. All profits raised will go to our three chosen charities. We hope to see you there on Saturday 6 June from 11:00- 15:00 at our Zekeriyakoy campus! The City Year 3 children had a wonderful time in Iznik this month on their residential trip. They thoroughly enjoyed all the activities on offer. Many thanks to the Year 3 teachers for preparing such a creative itinerary for these children to experience. The month was rounded off by a magnificent Talent Show arranged by Mademoiselle Lapointe and Miss Heather, our Student Council Support Teachers. They chose ten acts for the children to enjoy. The acts varied from traditional bal- let dancing to modern dance, from traditional piano to rap music, and even an archery show! Well done to all our brilliant participants; you thoroughly entertained us! Finally, we would like to say congratulations to our graduates this year. Several of these students started our school in Pre School and we are delighted to see them complete their studies at BISI and move successfully forward onto the next chapter in their life. We hope you enjoy this month’s Newsletter. Amanda Ilhan Richard I’Anson Pre and Primary School Deputy Director Pre and Primary School Director 2 Alkent — Year 1 Dear Greenpeace Year 1 children at Alkent have been learning all about writing letters using the wonderful children’s book ‘Dear Greenpeace…’. In the book, Emily finds a whale in her pond and writes to Greenpeace to ask their advice. The Alkent Year 1s have also been finding weird and won- derful animals in their homes – including crocodiles in the washing machine and tigers in their bedrooms! The children have written several imaginative letters as part of their Eng- lish work. They have also written to Greenpeace themselves as the children finished their Literacy unit by holding a cake sale to raise money for Greenpeace and the positive work they do in protecting our planet. Teachers at Alkent have been very impressed with the children’s letter writing skills. They are writing superstars! Miss Alix Peacock and Miss Molly Hill Year 1 Class Teachers The Year 1s baked and sold cakes to raise money to send to Greenpeace Super Letter writing from 3 Etiler—EYFS EYFS Sports Day - May 15th 2015 Another fabulous EYFS sports day event. It was great to see all the teams in their colours and patterns, and parents joining in with their children’s class teams too. We all enjoyed watching the gymnastics show before Miss Yana got us all energized with the warm ups. Then off we went around the track joining in water relays to parachute fun and a scooter race too. Thanks to the Year 6 students who helped at each station, you were great role models for the EYFS children. Mr Mahon did a fantastic job as our DJ controlling the music and pass- ing on instructions for all. We ended of the events with the children cheering on the adults for the Parents Race. Then Mr Richard and Miss Amanda presented all the children with a medal for participa- tion. A well done to all the EYFS children. We celebrated further with a delicious BBQ pic- nic lunch in the botanical gardens. A great day had by everyone! Miss Tamarisk EYFS Co-Ordinator. 4 5 Etiler — Year 3 6 Etiler — Year 5 Year 5A making a model of our Solar System The students in 5A made a simple model of the Solar System in the garden at Etiler. The idea was to put the planets (tennis balls, basketball, dodgeball, ping pong ball, etc) a roughly 'proportionate to real life' distance away from the Sun (the beach ball). The children took a table of distances of the planets from the Sun, in kil- ometers, and considered how to come up with proportionate distances which would fit into our garden - we didn't have 4,504,000,000km (distance to Neptune) to work with! James Appleby 7 Etiler—BISI Got Talent! BIS really has got talent! We had a fun filled afternoon watching magicians, rhythmic gymnasts, flute and piano soloists and duets. There was Aikido, mime, singing, a song and dance duo and LOTS of cardsharps! Thank you everyone who auditioned or participated. Etiler Campus 8 Zekeriyakoy—BISI Got Talent! 9 10 11 Primary—History Week History Week in Alkent In Alkent, we all had a great time during History Week investigating several different artefacts. We enjoyed asking lots of questions about each object and finding out all about them. Everyday we did interest- ing Literacy work based on the objects. Then on one afternoon, we were all mixed up into groups and en- joyed a range of activities. We learnt about European Castles, Aus- tralian Aboriginal Art and dinosaur fossil finding. At the end of the week we showed all of our friends the excellent work we have been doing. We love History and being Historians! Alison Guzel 12 History Week in Etiler Living History Day in Etiler Campus was very lively with reconstructions of the Conquering of Con- stantinople, building bridges to Macchi Picchu, Building the Rumeli Fort, counting Inca style, Printing Want- ed posters with reusable Gutenberg letters and catching and trying to get cured of the Bubonic Plague. A lot of fun was had by all and we hope the children learnt a lot too! Carolyn Guven Printed on Gutenbergs Press Making roads and bridges to macchu Picchu Building the Rumeli Fort Conquering Constantinople Catching the Plague Counting on an Inca quipa 13 History Week in Zekeriyakoy Living History Day It was a very exciting day on all campuses as the children travelled back in time, and around the world, to find out what different parts of the world were like during the time period 1350CE -1500CE. Zekeriyakoy Year 1, 2 and 3 Children travelled from Korea to India, England, Australia, China and Africa! In Korea they learnt about the introduction of simpler Korean characters to help everyone in Korea to be able to read and write. They met the very rich king of Calicut in India and the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama and his crew, finding out about the spices, which were so expensive they were called ‘white gold’. In England, they caught the plague and met the plague doctor finding out which of his weird and unusual ‘cures’ might have actually worked! They learnt how drumming was used to communicate in Africa and they played drums themselves. They learnt about Ming china, where it was exported to and why it was so important to the Chinese econo- my. In Australia, children were surprised to learn that the Aboriginal people had no written language and that their culture was passed down through stories, drawings and dances.